He quit Myntra to predict fashion trends with the help of neuroscience. Yup, you read that right.

Photo Credit: Bea Serendipity

Ask around, and one answer you’ll hear a lot will be “discounts.” No matter who fashion houses cater to, be they mass market retailers or high end department stores, discounting has always driven business, to the glee of shoppers and concern of accountants.

Clothing retailers mask them under many names. There are the end-of-season sales, festive sales, and then there are just sales to clear off inventory. But no matter how they peg it, the fact remains that while sales bring in customers, they pinch seller margins.

But not for long, if Ganesh Subramanian has his way. The former chief operating officer of Indian ecommerce giant Myntra has joined hands with machine learning and artificial intelligence expert Ram Prakash H to launch Stylumia, a platform that aims to scientifically predict fashion trends.

Ganesh Subramanian and Ram Prakash H of Stylumia.

The science of it

“Currently, about 80 percent of fashion houses’ predictions are based on speculation. We can bring that percentage down,” Ganesh tells Tech In Asia.

“In the fashion industry, more than half of what they make is sold at discounts. And this is not always because consumer tastes change,” he says. “Not everything in consumer tastes is transient. We help fashion brands make informed decisions on the basis of algorithms.

Is it possible to predict a customer’s likes or dislikes?

It is if you crunch a lot of data and use advanced science, according to Ram.

“Our product is based on research in neuroscience, which points towards the brain’s decision making process,” he says. Ram said the idea was not to dictate what a customer would like, but to latch on to their “constants” and get to the root of their decision making process.

In simple terms, Ganesh and Ram are unscrambling the process of how the brain works when shoppers make their fashion purchases.

That means studying what happens inside a customer’s head when she likes a particular product, decoding the choices and tastes that drive a purchase, and analyzing tons of data from the worlds of Instagram, Facebook, and Pinterest.

AI for fashion